Join the Inquisitorial Squad!

[grinning_soul]

More trouble brewing: Even though we still haven't heard anything from 6A about the promised new TOS regarding adult/'obscene' material, LJ is about to introduce a flagging option, i.e. logged-in users can flag other people's entries as 'adult content' (whatever that means...) which will automatically send a request for investigation to the Abuse Team. You can also use it to warn off unwary readers.
This is going to be so much fun.

Comments

[spes-unica.livejournal.com]

Well, sod that - what a way to police a community.

OTOH, a lot of stuff-sharing places have such functions (Youtube etc.). I guess if you think about it for a moment, it just means that you have to massively f-lock your stuff if you are a member/community dealing with obscene stuff. Which would produce one of the effects they want, namely, that no child googling for HP could, say, innocently land on the playwitch site (which I can't seem to do at the moment as it looks like it's been taken offline, big surprise...)

Then again, for the really big journals/communities, even with f-locking it would be impossible to control who is in and out, so nope, if you think about it for another moment, it really is just a mean and oppressive move.

(Watch her thinking aloud...)

[grinning-soul.livejournal.com]

As I see it, YouTube is not a community - there is very little interaction (and reading the comments is mostly a depressing experience). Also, LJ is still mostly text-based. It's a place to share ideas, thoughts, writing even though there are communities that focus on pictures and videos. And warnings are in place everywhere! If you can read, you usually don't stumble upon something that you wish you hadn't seen. Users and communities can also disallow search machines like google to index their journal to minimize the possibility of random non-lj members to read stuff that is very much catered to a specific audience. And let's face it, it's just impossible to protect immature internet users from absolutely everything they shouldn't see - that's the parents' job, actually. Lurker that I am, I'm glad that there are still a huge number of open journals, even though the events of the last few months have already led to a wave of increased friends-locking.
I guess we'll have to see how this will work when it's in place, but all I'm seeing right now is the huge potential for misuse. It's troll heaven! The idea of somebody flagging something they don't like and thus automatically alerting the Abuse Team just leaves a very Orwellian taste in my mouth...

[spes-unica.livejournal.com]

Gosh, you're really well-informed on the LJ-scene - I had no idea. And of course you're right about Youtube not being a community. I was rather rambling along in that post... Oh well. And yeah, can't protect teh little childrenz, goes without saying, and for more than just teh internetz of course...

Orwellian troll heaven

*giggles*
I'd like to see you make an icon out of that one... ;-)

[grinning-soul.livejournal.com]

There's a discussion on metafandom on the recent trend in flocking fics, might be worth checking out.

[spes-unica.livejournal.com]

Uh, how about making your paper out of that ...? "Orwellian troll heaven: policing the internet through [something]" or something. Great title.
(Yeah yeah, ok, just being random, too much research, right? Only I think it is a) a hot topic and would b) make for a great discussion afterwards. So you could just run through the situation and its developments and then sit back and watch the discussion roll... no?)